“I put them where you won’t come near them. In the living room. Under some cushions. I’ll get them out of the house later.”

The puppy tugged at Ezra’s pant cuff. Ezra took a deep breath and let it out, shuddering.

“So, show me around, Nyle?”

Nyle. He had called me Nyle.

“Sure,” I said.

I pointed out the highlights of my room. It didn’t seem like much as I showed it to Ezra. He must have had a much nicer bedroom in Cookshire, a much nicer house.

Making my way over to the night table, I started reading aloud the names of the R.I.F. books I had.

“You want to borrow one?”

“Sure,” Ezra said, choosing Slake’s Limbo. “I’d really like another chance at this one. I don’t remember much of it.” Of course he didn’t. He’d been more dead than alive while I’d read it to him.

The rest of my books featured girls as main characters or seemed too young for Ezra. I didn’t see how they’d interest him. Maybe tomorrow I could borrow some books from Muncie. We were getting along better since the trip to Manchester. Maybe she’d loan me some of hers.

Ezra sat on the floor and the puppy tumbled over him. He butted Ezra with his enormous head, biting Ezra’s hands with sharp puppy teeth. The dog grabbed a corner of Ezra’s flannel pajama top, really one of Gramp’s old shirts. He tugged at it, growling. Ezra growled back from behind the mask. The puppy let go of the shirttail in surprise. Plopping back on his bottom, he tilted his head to one side.

I laughed and sat on the floor opposite them. “Come on, dog,” I called, and clapped my hands together.

The puppy bounced away from Ezra and rolled across the floor toward me.

We played with him until Mrs. Trent called Ezra down.

As he descended to the kitchen, Ezra turned once and looked over his shoulder at me. The light from my bedroom spilled down the steps to touch the mask on his face, lighting his drooping eyes, his tiny scar.

Ezra smiled.

“’Night, Nyle,” he said.

He kept staring up at me.

It felt like when the stove has been cooking all day. Every square inch of me, inside and out, felt warm. Even my toes. I watched as Ezra turned, watched the back of his curly head moving down the steps.

Eighteen

Every night Ezra climbed to my room. He came, he said, to get a new book. Muncie gladly loaned me handfuls, mostly books a boy might like. She never asked any questions. And Ezra never asked how I suddenly had so many more books than I’d had that first night.

We played with the dog each evening, Ezra and I, teaching it to fetch and stay and sit, giving it bite-sized chunks of Gran’s bread as reward.

Ezra grew less dependent on Gramp’s walking stick, but he carried it anyway. He tried making the puppy jump over it. Usually, though, the dog either squeezed under or tumbled around the end of the stick to get to the other side. I hid the watches in the barn and gradually Ezra gave up wearing the radiation mask again.